Author: Caitriona Lynch Walsh

VirtualVet welcomes the launch of Ireland’s ‘One Health’ National Action Plan on Antimicrobial Resistance 2017-2020. The growing threat of antimicrobial resistance must be tackled through collaboration between animal and human health sectors. VirtualVet is gathering animal health data in near real-time providing accurate digital information to help stakeholders more accurately measure antibiotic and antimicrobial usage in food producing animals.

It is known that a large percentage of human diseases originate in animals. This requires the need for healthier animals thus requiring less medicine. Farmers gather important information daily on the health of their animals. This information can play a vital role in disease surveillance. We facilitate collection of these data providing a free remedy recording and compliance service, making the on-farm observations and treatments of animals available to government agencies and surveillance bodies in near real-time.

Digitising these valuable data helps to create awareness in our farmer clients about what they are giving their animals, prompting them to consider alternative ways to address their animals’ health. The different sectors in the farming industry can be seen through our remedy recording service breaking it down by species (pig, goat, sheep, dairy, beef), age, condition, why and what medicine was used along with the outcome.

VirtualVet is live, farmers are talking to us and they are using our service to record their remedies. We have learned they are listening to the WHO’s concerns about AMR and are keen to contribute what they can to tackling the overuse of antibiotics by sharing their antibiotic usage with us. Now all stakeholders and actors in the animal health and agri-food value chains have opportunities to use this information to aid research and understanding of antibiotic use, outcomes and alternatives across the different sectors in a collaborative way.